You need to get from New York
to San Francisco in a hurry. By train, it will take 7 days and cost $2,500. Do
you go for it?
In 1870, you did. The
transcontinental railroad was completed in May 1869, and it revolutionized
travel to the West Coast. A first class ticket cost $136 (about $2,500 today)
for a berth in a Pullman sleeping car—for $65 you could get space on a bench in
the third class coach. I know, don’t even think about it.
Before the railroad was
completed, the best a traveler in a hurry could do was take the Butterfield
Express (later Wells Fargo) overland stagecoach. First, you had to get to St.
Louis, MO, and then the stagecoach offered a spectacularly uncomfortable ride
across the western plains in about three weeks, and sometimes the stage didn’t
make it through. Traveling by boat from the East Coast to the West Coast took
about a month.
Political shenanigans about the
preferred route of the transcontinental line delayed the construction project
until the Civil War began. With southern legislators (who advocated a
“southern” route) out of the picture, the reps from northern states approved a
route from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. In the mid-1860s, the
national government handed out obscenely large cash grants and generous land
grants to the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad. There
was a lot of corruption, and a lot of worker exploitation, and a lot of folks
got rich as the two companies laid tracks, starting at the endpoints and
ultimately meeting at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.
You know the story about the golden spike and all the hoorah celebrating the completion of the rail link
across America.
It was a really big deal that
spread a lot of benefits around, although the Native Americans on the plains
and the buffalo herds got the other end of the stick, you know the story.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber
2015 All rights reserved.
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